of autorickshaws, millionaires and freakonomics – Part 2

Carrying on with the question Dubner asked on Freakonomics last week.

I’m going to take a rather different view to Abhishek Rawat. In essence, Abhishek states that the differences between autod drivers in Mumbai and Delhi are down to the greater numbers of autos and thus greater competition for fares in Mumbai. While this is true to some extent, I don’t think its the key reason for the differences between the 2 cities.

I currently live in Mumbai, grew up in Bangalore and have visited Delhi several times. Bangalore was a good case study since about 15 years ago, Bangalore’s autos were very similar in nature to Mumbai’s autos today. They were friendly, safe cooperative and went strictly by the meter. Now they are probably as bad if not worse than Delhi’s. Today it is near impossible to get an auto (or ‘ric as we refer to them) to a) go where you want to and b) go by the meter.

If I were to compare Bangalore today with Bangalore of 1990, the major difference is population and accompanying traffic. It is just a lot harder to get around by road in Bangalore than it used to be.

Anyway, enough rambling on Bangalore. The reason for the difference between Mumbai and Delhi’s ‘rics today and Bangalore’s ‘rics over time is this:

1. Competition among autos: As Abhishek said, Mumbai has the highest density of autos in an equivalent area of all three cities. Walk to any intersection and there are between 5 and 10 ‘rics, atleast, competing for you to ride with them.

2. Alternatives: I think Abhishek has got this point reversed. In Mumbai, modes of Public transport are:

a. taxi – the Central Business District to the northern suburbs and further on, essentially the entire city

b. auto – only the suburbs, about half the city. After specific points, autos can’t go south into the city.

c. local trains – the most heavily used option which connects the entire city together and very much the one thing that keeps Mumbai going.

d. local bus: a massive network that goes everywhere and integrates with inter-city bus lines.

All these alternatives have been around for decades. In Delhi, there are buses and now a metro, both of which are, compared to Mumbai, more recent options. Bangalore has no viable alternative to autos today.

So the result of that is a person is much more dependent on autos in Delhi and especially Bangalore than in Mumbai. If an auto driver were to ‘put up their price’ in Mumbai, commuters would just walk by and use something else, like the bus or train. Also, road transport, due to traffic jams is not as fast or as reliably on time as the trains in Mumbai. So these competitors have inequalities other than price.

3. City culture: Culturally, Mumbai is like New York. Delhi is like Washington DC. Bangalore is like a cross between a Florida beach and silicon valley. People are a lot less tolerant of time-wasting-haggling in Mumbai and will show their displeasure.

4. Economic demographics: This, I think is an important point and one which is bound to be quite controversial. Mumbai is a lot, lot more crowded than Delhi and Bangalore. People from the corporatized (and equivalent) middle / upper-middle class (in terms of buying power) form a far larger section of the population in Delhi and Bangalore than they do in Mumbai. So the market for autos in Delhi and Bangalore is a lot more tolerant of paying 10-20% over and above the meter.

So there you have it, as an auto driver in Mumbai, you are facing a potential customer who is financially and culturally much more reluctant to bargain than in other cities, competing with alternatives which on a speed aspect are superior, are limited geographically and you also have a lot more ‘colleagues’ driving their own autos around looking for a fare.

Apple and their patent – Part 2

Apple vs Palm. Only on pay-per-view.

Or not, if engadget’s analysis is to be believed. While it may be true that an Apple lawsuit may not have a leg to stand up unless someone mimics Apple’s scrolling system, everyone who thinks Apple will try anyway raise your hands.

It provides me pleasure that Palm’s got even more ammo on Apple (apparently) than vice-versa. Maybe they’ll leave each other alone and actually spend money on new products for us instead.

posted via Scribefire

of autorickshaws, millionaires and freakonomics – part 1

Stephen Dubner of Freakonomics has been asking some pertinent questions here and here.

As an Indian living in Mumbai, I need to weigh in on both these posts.

*********Potential Spoilers**********

What do I think of Slumdog Millionaire? I think its great. All in all, I really liked the movie. What struck me immediately after I finished watching was that it’s pretty much a hybrid of Hollywood and Bollywood filming aesthetics.

The portrayal of the slums is something that’s caused a good bit of controversy. As a mumbaiite for over 18 months, I can say this  much: it is real. In Mumbai, the portrayal of the slums is pretty accurate to real life, right down to the public ‘toilets’. Therein lies the problem. Mainstream bollywood typically deals in escapism. Bollywood deals with exotic locales, fast cars, mansions, and fresh-faced and well-dressed actors. of both sexes. Bollywood deals in weak plotlines with a lot of laughs and really really happy endings. So I’m not surprised the depiction of the slums is slightly too big a dose of realism for the stereotyped bollywood audience.

The story itself, is a classic bollywood line. The only thing more cliched in the industry than forbidden love that ends happily ever after is a forbidden love triangle that ends happily ever after. As Dubner rightly mentioned, it does feel forced and predictable in parts and wallows in excessive melodrama. That it wasn’t an out-an-out bollywood flick and did have some external influences did protect it from something overtly ridiculous like the protagonist driving a Ferrari at some point. While there’s nothing wrong with such a plot and is justifiably popular with the indian populace who watch movies for ‘time-pass’, I’m not surprised that there are people who don’t like the plot.

So to whip out my stereotyping brush and paint in broad strokes, there’s a demographic who probably prefer the greater realism of hollywood and liked the depictions itself and were rather underwhelmed by the plot and another demographic who resented the hard gritty depictions of Mumbai but loved the warm, fuzzy feel-good plot.

Me? I hope like a lot of other people, fall somewhere in the middle.

*****End Spoilers*****

I’ll post my thoughts on Dubner’s other question a little later. Probably during lunch.

Apple patents multitouch tech

As reported here on Slashdot and BetaNews. Apple has a propensity of IPR overprotection. How is this going to bode for touch? we’ll know soon enough.

My take: This is stupid. beyond stupid. what’s apple going to patent next? use of the color white with respect to consumer electronics? How about the letter ‘I’? Innovation is dependent on completely exploring the scope of a concept before moving on to the next. Processor were pushed to their limits before multi-core processors came out. Anyone who thinks Apple retarding progress on touch technology (which they assuredly will do) is a good thing say ‘I’.

Oh wait, saying ‘I’ is probably ripping IP.

posted from scribefire.

Mighty mighty newsreaders – Snarfer

Sorry for the lack of activity last few days. This is performance review season at work and that leaves me slightly…distracted.

aaanyway….on to snarfer. I’ve been using Mozilla Thunderbird for reading my gmail and the 30+ blogs and news feeds that I subscribe to. I also use bloglines from work since I can’t install Thunderbird there.  This weekend Thunderbird decided to update itself, and promptly break. (It turned to be an issue with my zone alarm firewall no longer recognizing it).

So i got bugged and decided to track down and start using a genuine dedicated newsreader instead of a mail application which also happens to be able to subscribe to RSS feeds.

I found quite a few. From Google Reader (web-based, which I did not want), to Awasu (free version limited to 100 channels to Pluck (firefox add-on, not interested in that) to the apparently popular Feeddemon (Not free, so not interested) before managing to track down this little app called Snarfer.

I immediately liked 1 fact about this app. The install file is an incredibly small 395 KB. yes, kilobytes. Not megabytes. The installation too was quick. Nothing unusual in a positive or negative sense.

Before I loaded the OPML I pulled off of bloglines, I added a few (just a few) from the built-in listr of popular feeds. The selection was good, the process was simple too. Just check those ya want and they automatically:

Even loading my own blogroll from an OPML was a synch. This was something I’d had trouble with Thunderbird back in the day and was a bit nervous. No issues however. Only gripe, if you can call it that is I couldn’t distribute my blogs through the folders at import itself and had to move them afterward. I don’t think that’s even a fair thing to ask of any reader so I won’t crib.

Once I’d persuaded ZoneAlarm that this wasn’t a berzerk piece of malware and it was really really ok for it access the internet, I felt even happier. Snarfer does a clever thing, it doesn’t load either a bland text of the post, nor the entire website like T’bird, but something in between. It loads all the text first, then loads all the pictures and seems to skip the rest. For mortals with poor internet, this is great since I can start reading pretty much immediately instead of waiting for the entire damn page to load, and if it is worth it, pictures and links are loaded by the time I care. Here’s a screenshot of text loaded and an image just starting to load on a Techcrunch post:

However, what really caught me eye and made this app a keeper are the plugins. There’s a plugin to post to twitter. There’s a plugin to synch with bloglines (YAY!!!). There’s a plugin to give notifications from the system tray (Did I mention that it minimizes to system tray? Yeah, it does that) and quite a few more. You can also email a post directly from within Snarfer. I installed twitter, bloglines and notification plugins. A couple more that might interest a lot of people are the post to del.icio.us plugin and a plugin that allows you to add static web pages to the feed folder tree.

It has other features like a plugin to search craigslist and another to search ebay, but they didnt interest too much.

On the whole, a good app to have if you want a focussed desktop based newsreader with little to no memory usage (process is 4 mb in system tray and about 15 mb maximized, about as much a web browser tab).

Another screenshot, showing the notification page and the final setup on my laptop. I removed the feeds to news sites like BBC since they give you a 1-liner, and prefer to casually browse those instead of a feed.

Windows Vista Upgrade Flowchart

This showed up in a forward in my email. ROFL.

Obama rocks my world

The Man is just not wasting time fixing Bush’s various messes.

Thursday January 22, 2009.20:56 GMT – Guantanamo (and others similiar) ordered closed

Friday January 23, 2009. 14:10 GMT – Stem Cell Research gets the go-ahead.

Saturday January 24, 2009. 00:30 GMT – Ban on Abortion Funding Lifted

The first marks the erasure of one of the largest stains on the ethics and human-rights of the western world. I’m quite uncompromising on this and say that there is isn’t any way to justify outright torture. I don’t want to go into the details of the why and the how since I just had breakfast.

The second and third are intrinsically tied (atleast for naysayers), and I have been waiting and hoping for for a long time for someone, anyone, to make this happen. The US was one of the largest supporters of family planning and the ‘Gag Order’ on abortion funding by Bush effectively broke down a lot of family planning worldwide. Most painfully, Africa.  Dear ole Bush’s reasons, officially, include the bizarre statement that the UN Population Fund supported chinese forced infanticide. OK. Anyone else believe that. The real reasons are of course pressure from the ultra-religious-conservative lobbies and interest groups that he just could or would not refuse. Whether in these 3 cases or repealing the restrictions on assault weapons (anyone got a good reason for that?)

As for the stem cell thing. the potential benefits overwhelm the 1-legged moral argument. imho.

Pharyngula put it well.

Sleeveface

I’m going to sleep, read about it just now. Now you read about it here. Brilliant stuff.

The Sky is Over…

..and we indulge in our self-righteous suicide. Because Serj said so.

Serj FREAKING Tankian. Musician. Poet. A towering lyricist on a par with Almighty himself (Jim Morrison, not John Lennon) who stands on the cliffs of our reality railing at all that is and makes you yearn for all that could and should be…

see what listening to System of a Down does to you?

I first heard System of a Down in freshman year of college. Watching Shavo Odadjian beady-eyed madness on my tiny dorm room 14-inch TV in the chopsuey! video had a resonance, even back then, with my inner lunatic.

It would be later, over a year after the release of Steal this Album! and with it the significant maturing both in SOAD’s musical complexity and in Serj’s lyrics that I started to get seriously hooked. With the release of hypnotize / mezmerize, System of a Down eventually supplanted EVERYTHING as my core musical sense.

I find it difficult to explain, to articulate the sheer potency of the effect System’s music has on me. In a world where incoherent grunting, the word ‘yeah’ and ‘oh’ repeating in various iterative combinations pass as lyrics; in a world where bands re-unite 25-30+ years after their prime to redefine and renew the music in people’s lives; in a world where money talks, bullshit walks and its more important to sue people than encourage creation…in this world System of a Down connects.

Serj’s wailing-doom-warble, Shavo’s demonic bass guitar built on the elemental fury of Daron Malakian and John Dalamayan tend to overwhelm the listener. initially. But the power and ferocity hide a sublime grace, and ability to make ‘pictures in your mind’, to make you feel the fundamental dissatisfaction at the heart of SOAD’s lyrics, to agree whole-heartedly, atleast for the moment, to stand up, step up, shout out, shout loud, be like SOAD and demand more, better and truer of the world, ourselves and everyone else. This is, to me, what SOAD is all about. They make us care, they break the walls of apathy and make, nay, demand, that we join them in the fun.

I could go on and on. I’ve been writing this post for over an hour with numerous edits and if I’m not careful, I could be here all weekend. I’ll leave you now with a video that inspired (correction: demanded) this post and some lyrics and quotes, to the band that gave a voice to ‘the generation that didn’t agree’.

Unnoficial youtube of Sky is Over, the single from Elect the Dead, Serj’s solo album.

byob:

You depend on our protection,

Yet you feed us lies from the table cloth..

…

Why don’t presidents fight the war? Why do they
always send the poor?

soldier side:

They were crying when their sons left God is
wearing black He’s gone so far to find no hope
he’s never coming back

forest:

Walk with me my little child
To the forest of denial
speak with me my only mind
walk with me until the time
and make the forest turn to wine
you take the legend for a fall

needles:

I’m just sitting in my room
with a needle in my hand
waiting for the doom
of some old dying man
sitting in my room
with a needle in my hand
waiting for the doom
of some old dying man

dreaming:

Dreaming of screaming Someone kick me out of my
mind I hate these thoughts I can’t deny Dreaming
of screaming Someone kick me out of my mind I
hate these thoughts I can’t de….

ADD:

We fought your wars with all our hearts.
You sent us back in body parts.
You took our wills with the truth you stole.
We offer prayers for your long lost souls.

Saul Williams on Serj:

Serj’s words, like his voice, have a distinct aesthetic sensibility connected to an unyielding, visceral roar of passion. His capacity ‘to mock a killing bird’ while we wonder at the grace, beauty, and colorful range of his wingspan will be the trademark of both of his singing and writing careers. Serj is an amazing artist, full of passion, with a beautiful heart that pumps the essence of his vision and talent.

Windows 7 – Mediocrity Refined

I didn’t say that. The New York Times did. The article is somewhat ironic to me considering my post a couple of days ago. (Here if you don’t / can’t / won’t scroll down)

I ranted about how Windows 7, like Vista before it, is a claimed ‘improvement’ on the previous version. (I’ll leave you to read my earlier post on what I think of Vista’s success on that front). Neither one is a ‘game-changer’, which in my humble opinion, is something badly needed today.  They way we use computers has changed drastically from 3 years ago, forget a decade. It’s time the paradigm of an OS changed.

The sad thing, the still-dominant (like it or not) player (MS) is unlikely to be the one to do it. As Cringely put it well here over here, MS probably will shrink and focus on enterprise. The signs are already there with the rave reviews on Windows Server 2008, which to me indicates MS’s priorities.

So here’s to hoping the little guys get creative.

Upcoming Posts: My take on Cringely predictions and some cool content on Firefox.